• Your 2nd grade son has become friends with a little classmate and is excited for his first “Spend a night” sleepover. You meet the family as you drop your son off and they seem nice. You visit with them and find out that this is their youngest child at 7. The oldest is 13. You think nothing of it. The next day when you pick him up and ask how it went, he seems unsettled. Come to find out they spent several hours playing “Call of Duty: Black Ops”.
  • Your daughter is getting texts from a friend. She’s in middle school. She shows you a text. Apparently her friend’s older brother took the phone and thought it would be funny to provide inappropriate texts and pictures.
  • You get together with some friends. Their kids are about the same ages as your kids. They’ve invited some other people who brought their children as well. The parents are upstairs and the kids down. On the way home, your kids talk about the language the other kids were using. They want to know what some words mean. Your youngest was there and now has grown up a few years earlier than you’d have preferred.

These are situations that happen every day. Parents try to create a wholesome world for their children to grow up in, but you can’t plastic wrap them into a bubble away from the world. Nor would you want to, but some situations you’d rather not deal with at all much less too early. And, unfortunately, it can get much, much worse than this. What should you do?

Fear is not the answer. You can’t retreat away from the world which probably has worse implications. Instead, advance. The best defense is a good offense. If you want to live in a world where children are safe, enough, you have to build that world. You want your children to be friendly and make friends. But you get to choose the families you hang with. You will discern who makes it into the circle while your children are developing discernment of their own.

We have been blessed by a community of friends for 20+ years where our children grew up together. Year after year of events, parties, camping at the Dunes, Easters, barbeques, 4th of July parties, summer baseball games and fall football games, and on and on. Our kids consider the kids of our friends their siblings. It all started 25 years ago at MOPS (Mothers Of Preschoolers), moved on to Parenting from the Tree of Life (fka Growing Kids God’s Way), and became a small group that lasted and lasted. When we sent our children to our friends’ house to play, we knew what the values were at that house. We knew that they would treat our children like their own…as we had their children.

Fun is an important component to getting together with new people. But implicit in fun is self control, understanding boundaries, and concern for the safety of others. So when a friend’s child acts up beyond reason, how do they handle that? Are they engaged and dealing with it prudently? If so, then it could be just one of those days. But what if the parents don’t engage and let the child continue to misbehave or the parents overreact in such a way that you consider there might be an issue there. If they parent from a different set of values, you’d probably shy away so whatever is going on doesn’t become a problem for your family. It is VERY difficult to evaluate someone else’s parenting and conclude that they just aren’t people you want your child around. But that is what you must do. Of course you must take the plank out of your own eye before helping a friend with their splinter. How could you be misunderstanding this? How might you do the same thing in different ways? Are you making a mountain out of a molehill? But in all this you’re taking it seriously because you are responsible for creating the world where your child can thrive.

We are not advocating judgmentalism where you judge everyone as inferior to play with your little darlings. Of course we’re not. You don’t want to be characterized as judgmental anyway. But you do want to be deemed proactive and positive. So we recommend being first to invite people into your world, have kids and parents over and be intentional in designing your group. Nothing wrong with that. Think about it, you’ll be hanging with these folks for the next 20 years. Choose wisely. Furthermore, initiate a small group so you can get past the hanging out and having fun and get into deeper layers. When you do that, you can see their heart in all kinds of situations. And as you well know, we’re going to recommend you take Parenting from the Tree of Life together. Investing in your family at the same time you’re investing in your peer group with a values based parenting program will absolutely create a safer world for your kids. There’s no better small group parenting program than Parenting from the Tree of Life.

We can safely tell you that one of the most important things in building a strong marriage and enhancing the bonds with your kids is having a rich community of friends you can laugh with in good times, lean on in tough times (and they will come), cry with in sad times (which will also come), and celebrate with in the many milestones of life. It’s not easy to build a group that considers itself a community, but having done so your life will be immensely rich.

To an abundant life,

Lis and Dave